John Mayer: Just Half of My Heart

Seven-time Grammy Award winning musician John Mayer’s new album Battle Studies was released on Tuesday.  And if Mayer has ever been successful at putting all of his pessimism about romance into a single album, then Battle Studies is the one.  “It’s one record about one thing,” Mayer said.  The underlying emotional tone that runs throughout the songs in the album is one of discomfort with close relationships and a relatively pervasive dark, dysphoric  mood.  Most of the songs in his album convey a sense of skepticism about love, lovers and anyone looking and passing judgment from the outside in.

Mayer was interviewed by Steven Daley this week in Details Magazine:

Daley wrote, “From the opening track, the U2-redolent Heartbreak Warfare, it’s clear that the musician who ingratiated his way into the nation’s heart with soft-serve hits like Your Body Is a Wonderland and Daughters has entered a new phase.  The record revives the spirit of that most maligned of 20th-century art forms, adult-oriented rock, channeling the likes of Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Dire Straits, and reflects how assured Mayer has become.  Battle Studies may well force some of his detractors to admit that the man they used to view as Dave Matthews’ cocky little nephew has grown up some.”

Mayer described his own thoughts about having to cope with his public face as a celebrity and with his detractors in the media, as opposed to Mayer the musician: “What do you think is stronger: a dozen press articles that say I’m this guy, or a record with 10 songs on it that you enjoy?  Which has greater staying power?  At the end of the day, all I owe the world in exchange for my dumb face being in their lives are the 10 songs every couple years that are hopefully of greater magnitude than somebody’s press story about me.”

John Mayer: Who Says (Battle Studies)

John Mayer: Heartbreak Warfare (Battle Studies), The Beacon Theatre, NYC

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Soupy Sales, Zany Slapstick Television Comedian, Dies at 83

Soupy Sales, whose wacky television routines turned the smashing of a pie to the face into a zany art form, died Thursday night at the age of 83.  A forerunner to Pee Wee Herman as a children’s television show host with wide adult appeal, Soupy bombarded television screens throughout most of his life.  Frolicking with his puppet sidekicks White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie the Lion and Hobart and Reba, the heads in the pot-bellied stove, transforming himself into the private detective Philo Kvetch, and playing host to the ever-present “nut at the door,” Soupy Sales became both a television favorite of youngsters and an anarchic comedy hero for teenagers and college students.

Clad in a top hat, sweater and bow tie, shuffling through his Mouse Dance, he reached his slapstick highpoint in the mid-1960s on The Soupy Sales Show, a widely syndicated television program based at WNEW-TV in New York City.  Soupy Sales became the Godfather of pie-throwing, and by his own count some 20,000 pies were hurled at Soupy or at visitors to his television shows in the 1950s and ’60s.  His celebrity pie-victims included Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis, all of whom turned up just for the honor of being creamed.

By 1966, his wild stunts heightened Mr. Sales’s appeal to young people as a comedian who loved to tease authority, and when he headlined a rock ’n’ roll show at New York’s Paramount Theater on Easter of that year, as many as 3,000 teenagers were lined up throughout Times Square hoping to get seats for his morning performance.  Mr. Sales was later a longtime panelist on television’s What’s My Line? and a host for a variety talk show on WNBC Radio in the 1980s.

In the 1959 video of The Soupy Sales Show: Lunch with Soupy Sales presented below, the television crew from The Soupy Sales Show sneaked an exotic dancer onto the set as a special surprise for Soupy’s birthday.

The Soupy Sales Show: Lunch with Soupy Sales, 1959

You can read more about the life of Soupy Sales in The New York Times here.

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Lady Gaga at The National Equality March: “This is the Biggest Moment of My Career!”

If you thought it was going to be a long time before you ever witnessed Lady Gaga make a grandly gay appearance on the C-Span television network, well you’ll just have to think again!  Our Lady Gaga of the Immaculate Penis spoke before thousands in attendance at The National Equality March on Washington today.  And there were two very memorable parts: first, when they placed a riser behind the podium for her to stand on and speak, and second, when she wooed the audience with a Judy Garland joke.  Reminders: Obama makes Lady Gaga joke, Gaga makes Judy Garland joke.  Oh yes…America, the Beautiful!!

Lady Gaga at The National Equality March: “This is the Biggest Moment of My Career!”

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Irving Penn Dies at 92: Pioneer of Modern Fashion, Portrait and Still-Life Photography

Irving Penn, 1960s

Kate Moss, 1996

Kate Moss, 1996

Vogue, Fashion Photograph (Café in Lima), Peru, 1948

Salvadore Dali, New York, 1947

Truman Capote, New York City, 1948

Collette, Paris, 1951

Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1948

Nicole Kidman, Vogue Magazine, May, 2004

Irving Penn, a renowned master of American fashion photography whose more simple aesthetic, combined with an often startling erotic sensuality, defined a visual style that he applied to such varied subjects as  fashion design, celebrity portraits and everyday objects, many of them now-famous photographs owned by leading art museums, has died at the age of 92.  In 1943, Penn started contributing to Vogue magazine, becoming one of the first commercial photographers to cross the schism that had separated commercial from art photography.  He did so in part by using the same technique no matter what he photographed: isolating his subject, allowing for scarcely a prop and building a work of graphic perfection through his printing process.  Art critics considered the results to be icons, not just images, each one more artistically powerful than the person or object in the frame.

A notorious perfectionist, he traveled widely, carrying his own studio to the ends of the earth to photograph Peruvians in native dress, veiled Moroccan women or the Mudmen of New Guinea.  Despite his appreciation for the art and craft of beautifully designed fashion, Penn later reached outside of the unreachable world it represents.  To escape or perhaps contest it, in the late 1960s he started photographing crushed cigarette butts and street debris.  He shot the cigarette butts in the same manner that he often photographed fashionable designer dresses, close up, with an intense graphic precision, against a white background.  He then built his negatives into “platinum-palladium” prints, a meticulous and expensive process that involves repeated printings of a negative on one piece of paper to create an extraordinary sense of depth and richness.  New York’s Museum of Modern Art found the cigarette butts exhibit-worthy in 1975. Far-sighted reviewers praised Penn’s ability to turn discarded objects into art, but the contradictions in his work still bothered some critics.

In 1950, while in Paris he went from a session of photographing the Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti to photographing French butchers.  His collection of more than 250 photos of butchers, bakers, street workers and others in the series entitled The Small Trades, was acquired last year by the J. Paul Getty Museum and is on view now through January 10th.

A Tribute: The Photography of Irving Penn

Slide Show: Irving Penn/A Pioneer of Modern Fashion, Portrait and Still-Life Photography

(Please Click on Image to View Slide Show)

Readers can read more about the life and accomplishments of Irving Penn in The New York Times here, and in The Los Angeles Times here.

Reader’s can access a wonderful audio-slide show of Irving Penn’s series entitled The Small Trades, which is presently on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum here.

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